Skeleton Crew

  Anyway, I started imaging on DELETE to begin with, not exactly making up a story so much as seeing pictures in my head. I was watching this guy (who is always to me just the I-Guy until the story actually starts coming out in words, when you have to give him a name) delete pictures hanging on the wall, and chairs in the living room, and New York City, and the concept of war. Then I thought of having him insert things and having those things just pop into the world.

  Then I thought, "So give him a wife that's bad to the bone--he can delete her, maybe--and someone else who's good to maybe insert." And then I fell asleep, and the next morning I was pretty much okay again. The bug went away but the story didn't. I wrote it, and you'll see it didn't turn out exactly as the foregoing might suggest, but then--they never do.

  I don't need to draw you a picture, do I? You don't do it for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something like that is just a monkey, that's all. The story paid me by letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn't. I paid the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be. The rest is just side effects.

  3

  I hope you'll like this book, Constant Reader. I suspect you won't like it as well as you would a novel, because most of you have forgotten the real pleasures of the short story. Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting between Maine and Pittsburgh during the making of Creepshow, and going mostly by car because of my fear of flying coupled with the air traffic controllers' strike and Mr. Reagan's subsequent firing of the strikers (Reagan, it appears, is really only an ardent unionist if the unions in question are in Poland). I had a reading of The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and for a space of about five weeks I wasn't even having an affair with that novel; I felt married to it (my favorite part was when the wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours).

  A short story is a different thing altogether--a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.

  Writing short stories hasn't gotten easier for me over the years; it's gotten harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat--I write like fat ladies diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales--all too often the I-Guy just floats away.

  The thing to do is to keep trying, I think. It's better to keep kissing and get your face slapped a few times than it is to give up altogether.

  4

  All right; that's just about it from this end. Can I thank a few people (you can skip this part if you want to)?

  Thanks to Bill Thompson for getting this going. He and I put Night Shift, the first book of short stories, together, and it was his idea to do this one. He's moved on to Arbor House since, but I love him just as well there as anywhere else. If there really is a gentleman left in the gentleman's profession of book publishing, it's this guy. God bless yer Irish heart, Bill.

  Thanks to Phyllis Grann at Putnam for taking up the slack.

  Thanks to Kirby McCauley, my agent, another Irishman, who sold most of these, and who pulled the longest of them, "The Mist," out of me with a chain fall.

  This is starting to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, but fuck it.

  Thanks are due to magazine editors, as well--Kathy Sagan at Redbook, Alice Turner at Playboy, Nye Willden at Cavalier, the folks at Yankee, to Ed Ferman--my man!--at Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  I owe just about everybody, and I could name them, but I won't bore you with any more. Most thanks are to you, Constant Reader, just like always--because it all goes out to you in the end. Without you, it's a dead circuit. If any of these do it for you, take you away, get you over the boring lunch hour, the plane ride, or the hour in detention hall for throwing spitballs, that's the payback.

  5

  Okay--commercial's over. Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it's no big deal; it's only because you are my love.

  Now listen:

  April 15th, 1984

  Bangor, Maine

  The Mist

  I. The Coming of the Storm

  This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke--the night of July 19--the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.

  We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before dark. For an hour before, the air had been utterly still. The American flag that my father put up on our boathouse in 1936 lay limp against its pole. Not even its hem fluttered. The heat was like a solid thing, and it seemed as deep as sullen quarry-water. That afternoon the three of us had gone swimming, but the water was no relief unless you went out deep. Neither Steffy nor I wanted to go deep because Billy couldn't. Billy is five.

  We ate a cold supper at five-thirty, picking listlessly at ham sandwiches and potato salad out on the deck that faces the lake. Nobody seemed to want anything but Pepsi, which was in a steel bucket of ice cubes.

  After supper Billy went out back to play on his monkey bars for a while. Steff and I sat without talking much, smoking and looking across the sullen flat mirror of the lake to Harrison on the far side. A few powerboats droned back and forth. The evergreens over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly building up, massing like an army. Lightning flashed inside them. Next door, Brent Norton's radio, tuned to that classical-music station that broadcasts from the top of Mount Washington, sent out a loud bray of static each time the lightning flashed. Norton was a lawyer from New Jersey and his place on Long Lake was only a summer cottage with no furnace or insulation. Two years before, we had a boundary dispute that finally wound up in county court. I won. Norton claimed I won because he was an out-of-towner. There was no love lost between us.

  Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her halter. I doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.

  "I don't want to scare you," I said, "but there's a bad storm on the way, I think."

  She looked at me doubtfully. "There were thunderheads last night and the night before, David. They just broke up."

  "They won't do that tonight."

  "No?"

  "If it gets bad enough, we're going to go downstairs."

  "How bad do you think it can get?"

  My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When he was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where the house now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls and all. Only the boathouse escaped. A year later he started the big house. It's the trees that do the damage in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind knocks them over. It's mother nature's way of cleaning house periodically.

  "I don't really know," I said, truthfully enough. I had only heard stories about the great storm of thirty-eight. "But the wind can come off the lake like an express train."

  Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun because he was "all sweated up." I ruffled his hair and gave him another Pepsi. More work for the dentist.

  The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no doubt now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat between his mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted and rolled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again. They gradually overspread the lake, and I could see a delicate caul of rain extending down from them. It was still a distance away. As we watched, it was probably raining on Bolster's Mi
lls, or maybe even Norway.

  The air began to move, jerkily at first, lifting the flag and then dropping it again. It began to freshen and grew steady, first cooling the perspiration on our bodies and then seeming to freeze it.

  That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake. It blotted out Harrison in seconds and then came straight at us. The powerboats had vacated the scene.

  Billy stood up from his chair, which was a miniature replica of our director's chairs, complete with his name printed on the back. "Daddy! Look!"

  "Let's go in," I said. I stood up and put my arm around his shoulders.

  "But do you see it? Dad, what is it?"

  "A water-cyclone. Let's go in."

  Steff threw a quick, startled glance at my face and then said, "Come on, Billy. Do what your father says."

  We went in through the sliding glass doors that give on the living room. I slid the door shut on its track and paused for another look out. The silver veil was three-quarters of the way across the lake. It had resolved itself into a crazily spinning teacup between the lowering black sky and the surface of the water, which had gone the color of lead streaked with white chrome. The lake had begun to look eerily like the ocean, with high waves rolling in and sending spume up from the docks and breakwaters. Out in the middle, big whitecaps were tossing their heads back and forth.

  Watching the water-cyclone was hypnotic. It was nearly on top of us when lightning flashed so brightly that it printed everything on my eyes in negative for thirty seconds afterward. The telephone gave out a startled ting! and I turned to see my wife and son standing directly in front of the big picture window that gives us a panoramic view of the lake to the northwest.

  One of those terrible visions came to me--I think they are reserved exclusively for husbands and fathers--of the picture window blowing in with a low hard coughing sound and sending jagged arrows of glass into my wife's bare stomach, into my boy's face and neck. The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.

  I grabbed them both hard and jerked them away. "What the hell are you doing? Get away from there!"

  Steff gave me a startled glance. Billy only looked at me as if he had been partially awakened from a deep dream. I led them into the kitchen and hit the light switch. The phone ting-a-linged again.

  Then the wind came. It was as if the house had taken off like a 747. It was a high, breathless whistling, sometimes deepening to a bass roar before glissading up to a whooping scream.

  "Go downstairs," I told Steff, and now I had to shout to make myself heard. Directly over the house thunder whacked mammoth planks together and Billy shrank against my leg.

  "You come too!" Steff yelled back.

  I nodded and made shooing gestures. I had to pry Billy off my leg. "Go with your mother. I want to get some candles in case the lights go off."

  He went with her, and I started opening cabinets. Candles are funny things, you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the power. And when the time comes, they hide.

  I was pawing through the fourth cabinet, past the half-ounce of grass that Steff and I bought four years ago and had still not smoked much of, past Billy's wind-up set of chattering teeth from the Auburn Novelty Shop, past the drifts of photos Steffy kept forgetting to glue in our album. I looked under a Sears catalogue and behind a Kewpie doll from Taiwan that I had won at the Fryeburg Fair knocking over wooden milk bottles with tennis balls.

  I found the candles behind the Kewpie doll with its glazed dead man's eyes. They were still wrapped in their cellophane. As my hand closed around them the lights went out and the only electricity was the stuff in the sky. The dining room was lit in a series of shutterflashes that were white and purple. Downstairs I heard Billy start to cry and the low murmur of Steff soothing him.

  I had to have one more look at the storm.

  The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the shoreline, but I still couldn't see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water was in complete turmoil. I saw someone's dock--the Jassers', maybe--hurry by with its main supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the churning water.

  I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave him a hug. Then I lit the candles. We sat in the guest room down the hall from my little studio and looked at each other's faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.

  "Is it over?" Steff asked.

  "Maybe," I said. "Maybe only for a while."

  We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.

  It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past Billy's bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.

  About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut of them all.

  The second squall wasn't so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid. Billy jumped and looked apprehensively upward.

  "It'll hold, champ," I said.

  Billy smiled nervously.

  Around ten o'clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.

  "David, what was that?"

  "I think it was the boathouse."

  "Oh. Oh, Jesus."

  "Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again." I took Billy in my arms and stood up with him. Steff's eyes were big and frightened.

  "David, are we going to be all right?"

  "Yes."

  "Really?"

  "Yes."

  We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a splintering crash from upstairs--the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn't been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.

  "The rain will come in," she said. "It'll ruin the furniture."

  "If it does, it does. It's insured."

  "That doesn't make it any better," she said in an upset, scolding voice. "Your mother's dresser ... our new sofa ... the color TV ..."

  "Shhh," I said. "Go to sleep."

  "I can't," she said, and five minutes later she had.

  I stayed awake for another half hour with one lit candle for company, listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning, a lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners cut up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.

  The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on the bed, and looked into the living room. The sliding glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I coul
d remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn't make it any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.

  I went downstairs again. All three of us slept together in the guest bed, Billy between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a mist.

  II. After the Storm. Norton. A Trip to Town.

  "Jeee-pers," Billy said.

  He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton's and looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of a mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it's Bridgton.

  I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold.

  "Don't go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough." Billy didn't argue.